The present invention relates in general to the field of computers and similar technologies, and in particular to software utilized in this field. Still more particularly, the present invention describes a novel approach to creating a one-dimensional portlet for an item such as a podcast.
A portal (a.k.a. “web portal”) utilizes a customizable webpage to provide personalized browsing capability to a World Wide Web (“Web”) user. A portal may be general or specialized. For example, a general portal (such as a browser window) typically contains a search window, through which a user can search for desired content. A specialized portal is typically directed to a targeted audience of users, such as employees of an enterprise, etc.
As described in the Java™ Portlet Specification (“Java™ Portlet Specification, Version 1.0, published Oct. 7, 2003 by Sun Microsystems, Inc., and incorporated herein by reference in its entirety), a portal page typically uses multiple portlets, which are web components, managed by a portlet container that provides a runtime environment for portlets. For example, as shown in FIG. 1, a portal page 102 is composed of multiple portlet windows 104a-n, each of which displays a different two-dimensional (2D) content (having non-serial data that can be accessed in a random manner). Each portlet window 104 may be fixed to a particular content provider (e.g., only content from a particular website such as www.ibm.com), or a portlet may be conditional (e.g., providing weather information relevant to a user who lives in Zip code 27845). The portlets are managed and provided by a portal server (not shown), which provides web content and controls Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) associated with each portlet.